An Interlude
At daybreak Peter Ferrara came to the house.
"How are you?" he asked.
"Sore. Wobbly." MacRae had tried his legs and found them wanting.
"It was a bad night all round, eh, lad?" Peter rumbled in his rough old
voice. "Some of the boys got a line on the _Blackbird_ and hauled what
was left of her around into the Cove. But she's a ruin. The engine went
to pieces while she was poundin' on the rocks. Steve lays in the house.
He looks peaceful--as if he was glad to be through."
"I couldn't save him. It was done like that." MacRae snapped his
fingers.
"I know," Old Peter said. "You're not to blame. Perhaps nobody is. Them
things happen. Manuel'll feel it. He's lost both sons now. But Steve's
better off. He'd 'a' died of consumption or something, slow an' painful.
His lungs was gone. I seen him set for weeks on the porch wheezin' after
he come home. He didn't get no pleasure livin'. He said once a bullet
would 'a' been mercy. No, don't worry about Steve. We all come to it
soon or late, John. It's never a pity for the old or the crippled to
die."
"You old Spartan," MacRae muttered.
"What's that?" Peter asked. But MacRae did not explain. He asked about
Dolly instead.
"She was up to Potter's Landing. I sent for her and she's back," Peter
told him. "She'll be up to see you presently. There's no grub in the
house, is there? Can you eat? Well, take it easy, lad."
An hour or so later Dolly Ferrara brought him a steaming breakfast on a
tray. She sat talking to him while he ate.
"Gower will have to pay for the _Blackbird_, won't he?" she asked. "The
fishermen say so."
"If he doesn't in one way he will another," MacRae answered
indifferently. "But that doesn't help Steve. The boat doesn't matter.
One can build boats. You can't bring a man back to life when he's dead."
"If Steve could talk he'd say he didn't care," Dolly declared sadly.
"You know he wasn't getting much out of living, Jack. There was nothing
for him to look forward to but a few years of discomfort and
uncertainty. A man who has been strong and active rebels against dying
by inches. Steve told me--not so very long ago--that if something would
finish him off quickly he would be glad."
If that had been Steve's wish, MacRae thought, then fate had hearkened
to him. He knew it was true. He had lived at elbows with Steve all
summer. Steve never complained. He was made of different stuff. It was
only a gloomy consolation, after all, to think of Steve as being better
off. MacRae knew how men cling to life, even when it has lost all its
savor. There is that imperative will-to-live which refuses to be denied.
Dolly went away. After a time Wallis came over from the cottage at
Cradle Bay. He was a young and genial medico from Seattle, who had just
returned from service with the American forces overseas, and was
holidaying briefly before he took up private practice again. He had
very little more than a casual interest in MacRae, however, and he did
not stay long once he had satisfied himself that his patient had little
further need of professional services. And MacRae, who was weaker than
he expected to find himself, rested in his bed until late afternoon
brought bars of sunlight streaming through openings in the cloud bank
which still ran swift before the wind.
Then he rose, dressed, made his way laboriously and painfully down to
the Cove's edge and took a brief look at the hull of the _Blackbird_
sunk to her deck line, her rail and cabins broken and twisted. After
that he hailed a fisherman, engaged him to go across to Solomon River
and apprise the _Bluebird_. That accomplished he went back to the house.
Thereafter he spent days lying on his bed, resting in a big chair before
the fireplace while his wounds healed and his strength came back to him,
thinking, planning, chafing at inaction.
There was a perfunctory inquest, after which Steve's body went away to
Hidalgo Island to rest beside the bodies of other Ferraras in a plot of
ground their grandfather had taken for his own when British Columbia was
a Crown colony.
MacRae carried insurance on both his carriers. There was no need for him
to move against Gower in the matter. The insurance people would attend
efficiently to that. The adjusters came, took over the wreck, made
inquiries. MacRae made his formal claim, and it was duly paid.
But long before the payment was made he was at work, he and Vin Ferrara
together, on the _Bluebird_, plowing the Gulf in stormy autumn weather.
The season was far gone, the salmon run slackening to its close. It was
too late to equip another carrier. The cohoes were gone. The dog
salmon, great-toothed, slimy fish which are canned for European
export--for cheap trade, which nevertheless returned much profit to the
canneries--were still running.
MacRae had taken ninety per cent. of the Folly Bay bluebacks. He had
made tremendous inroads on Folly Bay's take of coho and humpback. He did
not care greatly if Gower filled his cans with "dogs." But the
Bellingham packers cried for salmon of whatsoever quality, and so MacRae
drove the _Bluebird_ hard in a trade which gave him no great profit,
chiefly to preserve his connection with the American canners, to harass
Folly Bay, and to let the fishermen know that he was still a factor and
could serve them well.
He was sick of the smell of salmon, weary of the eternal heaving of the
sea under his feet, of long cold tricks at the wheel, of days in somber,
driving rain and nights without sleep. But he kept on until the salmon
ceased to run, until the purse seiners tied up for the season, and the
fishermen put by their gear.
MacRae had done well,--far better than he expected. His knife had cut
both ways. He had eighteen thousand dollars in cash and the _Bluebird_.
The Folly Bay pack was twelve thousand cases short. How much that
shortage meant in lost profit MacRae could only guess, but it was a
pretty sum. Another season like that,--he smiled grimly. The next season
would be better,--for him. The trollers were all for him. They went out
of their way to tell him that. He had organized good will behind him.
The men who followed the salmon schools believed he did not want the
earth, only a decent share. He did not sit behind a mahogany desk in
town and set the price of fish. These men had labored a long time under
the weighty heel of a controlled industry, and they were thankful for a
new dispensation. It gave MacRae a pleasant feeling to know this. It
gave him also something of a contempt for Gower, who had sat tight with
a virtual monopoly for ten years and along with his profits had earned
the distrust and dislike of a body of men who might as easily have been
loyal laborers in his watery vineyards,--if he had not used his power to
hold them to the most meager return they could wring from the sea.
He came home to the house at Squitty Cove with some odds and ends from
town shops to make it more comfortable, flooring to replace the old,
worn boards, a rug or two, pictures that caught his fancy, new cushions
for the big chairs old Donald MacRae had fashioned by hand years before,
a banjo to pick at, and a great box of books which he had promised to
read some day when he had time. And he knew he would have time through
long winter evenings when the land was drenched with rain, when the
storm winds howled in the swaying firs and the sea beat clamorously
along the cliffs. He would sit with his feet to a glowing fire and read
books.
He did, for a time. When late November laid down a constant barrage of
rain and the cloud battalions marched and countermarched along the
coast, MacRae had settled down. He had no present care upon his
shoulders. Although he presumed himself to be resting, he was far from
idle. He found many ways of occupying himself about the old place. It
was his pleasure that the old log house should be neat within and
without, the yard clean, the garden restored to order. It had suffered a
season's neglect. He remedied that with a little labor and a little
money, wishing, as the place took on a sprightlier air, that old Donald
could be there to see. MacRae was frank in his affection for the spot.
No other place that he had ever seen meant quite the same to him. He was
always glad to come back to it; it seemed imperative that he should
always come back there. It was home, his refuge, his castle. Indeed he
had seen castles across the sea from whose towers less goodly sights
spread than he could command from his own front door, now that winter
had stripped the maple and alder of their leafy screen. There was the
sheltered Cove at his feet, the far sweep of the Gulf--colored according
to its mood and the weather--great mountain ranges lifting sheer from
blue water, their lower slopes green with forest and their crests white
with snow. Immensities of land and trees. All his environment pitched
upon a colossal scale. It was good to look at, to live among, and MacRae
knew that it was good.
He sat on a log at the brink of the Cove one morning, in a burst of
sunshine as grateful as it was rare. He looked out at the mainland
shore, shading away from deep olive to a faint and misty blue. He cast
his gaze along Vancouver Island, a three-hundred-mile barrier against
the long roll of the Pacific. He thought of England, with its scant area
and its forty million souls. He smiled. An empire opened within range of
his vision. He had had to go to Europe to appreciate his own country.
Old, old peoples over there. Outworn, bewildered aristocracies and vast
populations troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rabbits,
pressing always close upon the means of subsistence. No room; no chance.
Born in social stratas solidified by centuries. No wonder Europe was
full of race and class hatred, of war and pestilence. Snap
judgment,--but Jack MacRae had seen the peasants of France and Belgium,
the driven workmen of industrial France and England. He had seen also
something of the forces which controlled them, caught glimpses of the
iron hand in the velvet glove, a hand that was not so sure and steady as
in days gone by.
Here a man still had a chance. He could not pick golden apples off the
fir trees. He must use his brains as well as his hands. A reasonable
measure of security was within a man's grasp if he tried for it. To pile
up a fortune might be a heavy task. But getting a living was no
insoluble problem. A man could accomplish either without selling his
soul or cutting throats or making serfs of his fellow men. There was
room to move and breathe,--and some to spare.
Perhaps Jack MacRae, in view of his feelings, his cherished projects,
was a trifle inconsistent in the judgments he passed, sitting there on
his log in the winter sunshine. But the wholly consistent must die
young. Their works do not appear in this day and hour. The normal man
adjusts himself to, and his actions are guided by, moods and
circumstances which are seldom orderly and logical in their sequence.
MacRae cherished as profound an animosity toward Horace Gower as any
Russian ever felt for bureaucratic tyranny. He could smart under
injustice and plan reprisal. He could appreciate his environment, his
opportunities, be glad that his lines were cast amid rugged beauty. But
he did not on that account feel tolerant toward those whom he conceived
to be his enemies. He was not, however, thinking concretely of his
personal affairs or tendencies that bright morning. He was merely
sitting more or less quiescent on his log, nursing vagrant impressions,
letting the sun bathe him.
He was not even conscious of trespassing on Horace Gower's land. When
he thought of it, of course he realized that this was legally so. But
the legal fact had no reality for MacRae. Between the Cove and Point
Old, for a mile back into the dusky woods, he felt free to come and go
as he chose. He had always believed and understood and felt that area to
be his, and he still held to that old impression. There was not a foot
of that six hundred acres that he had not explored alone, with his
father, with Dolly Ferrara, season after season. He had gone barefoot
over the rocks, dug clams on the beaches, fished trout in the little
streams, hunted deer and grouse in the thickets, as far back as he could
remember. He had loved the cliffs and the sea, the woods around the Cove
with an affection bred in use and occupancy, confirmed by the sense of
inviolate possession. Old things are dear, if a man has once loved them.
They remain so. The aura of beloved familiarity clings to them long
after they have passed into alien hands. When MacRae thought of this and
turned his eyes upon this noble sweep of land and forest which his
father had claimed for his own from the wilderness, it was as if some
one had deprived him of an eye or an arm by trickery and unfair
advantage.
He was not glooming over such things this rare morning which had come
like a benediction after ten days of rain and wind. He was sitting on
his log bareheaded, filled with a passive content rare in his recent
experience.
From this perch, in the idle wandering of his gaze, his eyes at length
rested upon Peter Ferrara's house. He saw a man and a woman come out of
the front door and stand for a minute or two on the steps. He could not
recognize the man at the distance, but he could guess. The man presently
walked away around the end of the Cove, MacRae perceived that his guess
was correct, for Norman Gower came out on the brow of the cliff that
bordered the south side of the Cove. He appeared a short distance away,
walking slowly, his eyes on the Cove and Peter Ferrara's house. He did
not see MacRae till he was quite close and glanced that way.
"Hello, MacRae," he said.
"How d' do," Jack answered. There was no cordiality in his tone. If he
had any desire at that moment it was not for speech with Norman Gower,
but rather a desire that Gower should walk on.
But the other man sat down on MacRae's log.
"Not much like over the pond, this," he remarked.
"Not much," MacRae agreed indifferently.
Young Gower took a cigarette case out of his pocket, extended it to
MacRae, who declined with a brief shake of his head. Norman lighted a
cigarette. He was short and stoutly built, a compact, muscular man
somewhat older than MacRae. He had very fair hair and blue eyes, and the
rose-leaf skin of his mother had in him taken on a masculine floridity.
But he had the Gower mouth and determined chin. So had Betty, MacRae was
reminded, looking at her brother.
"You sank your harpoon pretty deep into Folly Bay this season," Norman
said abruptly. "Did you do pretty well yourself?"
"Pretty well," MacRae drawled. "Did it worry you?"
"Me? Hardly," young Gower smiled. "It did not cost _me_ anything to
operate Folly Bay at a loss while I was in charge. I had neither money
nor reputation to lose. You may have worried the governor. I dare say
you did. He never did take kindly to anything or any one that interfered
with his projects. But I haven't heard him commit himself. He doesn't
confide in me, anyway, nor esteem me very highly in any capacity. I
wonder if your father ever felt that way about you?"
"No," MacRae said impulsively. "By God, no!"
"Lucky. And you came home with a record behind you. Nothing to handicap
you. You jumped into the fray to do something for yourself and made good
right off the bat. There is such a thing as luck," Norman said soberly.
"A man can do his best--and fail. I have, so far. I was expected to come
home a credit to the family, a hero, dangling medals on my manly chest.
Instead, I've lost caste with my own crowd. Girls and fellows I used to
know sneer at me behind my back. They put their tongues in their cheek
and say I was a crafty slacker. I suppose you've heard the talk?"
"No," MacRae answered shortly; he had forgotten Nelly Abbott's
questioning almost the first time he met her. "I don't run much with
your crowd, anyway."
"Well, they can think what they damn please," young Gower grumbled.
"It's quite true that I was never any closer to the front than the Dover
cliffs. Perhaps at home here in the beginning they handed me a captain's
commission on the family pull. But I tried to deliver the goods. These
people think I dodged the trenches. They don't know my eyesight spoiled
my chances of going into action. I couldn't get to France. So I did my
bit where headquarters told me I could do it or go home. And all I have
got out of it is the veiled contempt of nearly everybody I know, my
father included, for not killing Germans with my own hands."
MacRae kept still. It was a curious statement. Young Gower twisted and
ground his boot heel into the soft earth.
"Being a rich man's son has proved a considerable handicap in my case,"
he continued at last. "I was petted and coddled all my life. Then the
war came along. Everybody expected a lot of me. And I am as good as
excommunicated for not coming up to expectations. Beautiful irony. If my
eyes had been normal, I should be another of Vancouver's heroes,--alive
or dead. The spirit doesn't seem to count. The only thing that matters,
evidently, is that I stayed on the safe side of the Channel. They take
it for granted that I did so because I valued my own skin above
everything. Idiots."
"You can easily explain," MacRae suggested.
"I won't. I'd see them all in Hades first," Norman growled. "I'll admit
it stings me to have people think so and rub it in, in their polite way.
But I'm getting more or less indifferent. There are plenty of real
people in England who know I did the only work I could do and did it
well. Do you imagine I fancied sitting on the side lines when all the
fellows I knew were playing a tough game? But I can't go about telling
that to people at home. I'll be damned if I will. A man has to learn to
stand the gaff sometime, and the last year or so seems to be my period
of schooling."
"Why tell all this to me?" MacRae asked quietly.
Norman rose from the log. He chucked the butt of his cigarette away. He
looked directly, rather searchingly, at MacRae.
"Really, I don't know," he said in a flat, expressionless. Then he
walked on.
MacRae watched him pass out of sight among the thickets. Young Gower had
succeeded in dispelling the passive contentment of basking in the sun.
He had managed to start buzzing trains of not too agreeable reflection.
MacRae got to his feet before long and tramped back around the Cove's
head. He had known, of course, that the Gowers still made more or less
use of their summer cottage. But he had not come in personal contact
with any of them since the night Betty had given him that new,
disturbing angle from which to view her. He had avoided her purposely.
Now he was afflicted with a sudden restlessness, a desire for other
voices and faces besides his own, and so, as he was in the habit of
doing when such a mood seized him, he went on to Peter Ferrara's house.
He walked in through a wide-open door, unannounced by aught save his
footsteps, as he was accustomed to do, and he found Dolly Ferrara and
Betty Gower laughing and chatting familiarly in the kitchen over teacups
and little cakes.
"Oh, I beg pardon," said he. "I didn't know you were entertaining."
"I don't entertain, and you know it," Dolly laughed. "Come down from
that lofty altitude and I'll give you a cup of tea."
"Mr. MacRae, being an aviator of some note," Betty put in, "probably
finds himself at home in the high altitudes."
"Do I seem to be up in the air?" MacRae inquired dryly. "I shall try to
come down behind my own lines, and not in enemy territory."
"You might have to make a forced landing," Dolly remarked.
Her great dusky eyes rested upon him with a singular quality of
speculation. MacRae wondered if those two had been talking about him,
and why.
There was an astonishing contrast between these two girls, MacRae
thought, his mind and his eyes busy upon them while his tongue uttered
idle words and his hands coped with a teacup and cakes. They were the
product of totally dissimilar environments. They were the physical
antithesis of each other,--in all but the peculiar feline grace of young
females who are healthily, exuberantly alive. Yet MacRae had a feeling
that they were sisters under their skins, wonderfully alike in their
primary emotions. Why, then, he wondered, should one be capable of
moving him to violent emotional reactions (he had got that far in his
self-admissions concerning Betty Gower), and the other move him only to
a friendly concern and latterly a certain pity?
Certainly either one would quite justify a man in seeking her for his
mate, if he found his natural instincts urging him along ways which
MacRae was beginning to perceive no normal man could escape traveling.
And if he had to tread that road, why should it not have been his desire
to tread it with Dolly Ferrara? That would have been so much simpler.
With unconscious egotism he put aside Norman Gower as a factor. If he
had to develop an unaccountable craving for some particular woman, why
couldn't it have centered upon a woman he knew as well as he knew Dolly,
whose likes and dislikes, little tricks of speech and manner, habits of
thought, all the inconsiderable traits that go to make up what we call
personality, were pleasantly familiar?
Strange thoughts over a teacup, MacRae decided. It seemed even more
strange that he should be considering such intimately personal things in
the very act of carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; as if
there were two of him present, one being occupied in the approved teacup
manner while the other sat by speculating with a touch of moroseness
upon distressingly important potentialities. This duality persisted in
functioning even when Betty looked at her watch and said, "I must go."
He walked with her around to the head of the Cove. He had not wanted to
do that,--and still he did. He found himself filled with an intense and
resentful curiosity about this calm, self-possessed young woman. He
wondered if she really had any power to hurt him, if there resided in
her any more potent charm than other women possessed, or if it were a
mere sentimental befogging of his mind due to the physical propinquity
of her at a time when he was weak and bruised and helpless. He could
feel the soft warmth of her hands yet, and without even closing his eyes
he could see her reddish-brown hair against the white of his bed covers
and the tired droop of her body as she slept that night.
Curiously enough, before they were well clear of the Ferrara house they
had crossed swords. Courteously, to be sure. MacRae could not afterward
recall clearly how it began,--something about the war and the
after-effect of the war. British Columbia nowise escaped the muddle into
which the close of the war and the wrangle of the peacemakers had
plunged both industry and politics. There had been a recent labor
disturbance in Vancouver in which demobilized soldiers had played a
part.
"You can't blame these men much. They're bewildered at some of the
things they get up against, and exasperated by others. A lot of them
have found the going harder at home than it was in France. A lot of
promises and preachments don't fit in with performance since the guns
have stopped talking. I suppose that doesn't seem reasonable to people
like you," MacRae found himself saying. "You don't have to gouge and
claw a living out of the world. Or at least, if there is any gouging
and clawing to be done, you are not personally involved in it. You get
it done by proxy."
Betty flushed slightly.
"Do you always go about with a chip on your shoulder?" she asked. "I
should think you did enough fighting in France."
"I learned to fight there," he said. "I was a happy-go-lucky kid before
that. Rich and poor looked alike to me. I didn't covet anything that
anybody had, and I didn't dream that any one could possibly wish to take
away from me anything that I happened to have. I thought the world was a
kind and pleasant place for everybody. But things look a little
different to me now. They sent us fellows to France to fight Huns. But
there are a few at home, I find. Why shouldn't I fight them whenever I
see a chance?"
"But _I'm_ not a Hun," Betty said with a smile.
"I'm not so sure about that."
The words leaped out before he was quite aware of what they might imply.
They had come to a point on the path directly in front of his house.
Betty stopped. Her gray eyes flashed angrily. Storm signals blazed in
her cheeks, bright above the delicate white of her neck.
"Jack MacRae," she burst out hotly, "you are a--a--a first-class idiot!"
Then she turned her back on him and went off up the path with a quick,
springy step that somehow suggested extreme haste.
MacRae stood looking after her fully a minute. Then he climbed the
steps, went into the front room and sat himself down in a deep,
cushioned chair. He glowered into the fireplace with a look as black as
the charred remains of his morning fire. He uttered one brief word after
a long period of fixed staring.
"Damn!" he said.
It seemed a very inadequate manner of expressing his feelings, but it
was the best he could do at the moment.
He sat there until the chill discomfort of the room stirred him out of
his abstraction. Then he built a fire and took up a book to read. But
the book presently lay unheeded on his knees. He passed the rest of the
short forenoon sprawled in that big chair before the fireplace,
struggling with chaotic mental processes.
It made him unhappy, but he could not help it. A tremendous assortment
of mental images presented themselves for inspection, flickering up
unbidden out of his brain-stuff,--old visions and new, familiar things
and vague, troublesome possibilities, all strangely jumbled together.
His mind hopped from Squitty Cove to Salisbury Plain, to the valley of
the Rhone, to Paris, London, Vancouver, turned up all sorts of
recollections, cameralike flashes of things that had happened to him,
things he had seen in curious places, bits of his life in that somehow
distant period when he was a youngster chumming about with his father.
And always he came back to the Gowers,--father, son and daughter, and
the delicate elderly woman with the faded rose-leaf face whom he had
seen only once. Whole passages of Donald MacRae's written life story
took form in living words. He could not disentangle himself from these
Gowers.
And he hated them!
Dark came down at last. MacRae went out on the porch. The few scattered
clouds had vanished completely. A starry sky glittered above horizons
edged by mountain ranges, serrated outlines astonishingly distinct. The
sea spread duskily mysterious from duskier shores. It was very still, to
MacRae suddenly very lonely, empty, depressing.
The knowledge that just across a narrow neck of land the Gowers,
father, daughter and son, went carelessly, securely about their own
affairs, made him infinitely more lonely, irritated him, stirred up a
burning resentment against the lot of them. He lumped them all together,
despite a curious tendency on the part of Betty's image to separate
itself from the others. He hated them, the whole damned, profiteering,
arrogant, butterfly lot. He nursed an unholy satisfaction in having made
some inroad upon their comfortable security, in having "sunk his
harpoon" into their only vulnerable spot.
But that satisfaction did not give him relief or content as he stood
looking out into the clear frost-tinged night. Squitty had all at once
become a ghostly place, haunted with sadness. Old Donald MacRae was
living over again in him, he had a feeling, reliving those last few
cheerless, hopeless years which, MacRae told himself savagely, Horace
Gower had deliberately made more cheerless and hopeless.
And he was in a fair way to love that man's flesh and blood? MacRae
sneered at himself in the dark. Never to the point of staying his hand,
of foregoing his purpose, of failing to strike a blow as chance offered.
Not so long as he was his father's son.
"Hang it, I'm getting morbid," MacRae muttered at last. "I've been
sticking around here too close. I'll pack a bag to-morrow and go to town
for a while."
He closed the door on the crisp, empty night, and set about getting
himself something to eat.